[Question about cummulus maximum height.]

On ‎15‎/‎06‎/‎2018 at 09:51, knocker said:

Put very simplistically once the parcel of air has reached the lifting condensation level it will continue to cool along the saturated adiabatic lapse rate and if it warmer than the environmental temperature it is in an area of free convection and it will continue to rise freely on it's own accord without requiring a lifting mechanism ( e.g. upper level divergence, lower level convergence). Quite important because much of the work producing the cloud is done by the parcel rising on it's own ( a key factor in thunderstorm development). It will continue to rise freely until it's temperature becomes cooler than the environment, called the equilibrium level (EL).. You can work this out using a skew-t diagram and, fairly obviously, it is not necessarily at the tropopause but with large convective clouds such as Cbs in probably will be but in other circumstances the EL will act as a cap.

You do very often of coarse need a mechanism to lift the parcel to the area of free convection 

Thanks for your anwser.

[Question about cummulus maximum height.]

God morning-afternoon everyone. 

I have a question.

Since cummulus are convective clouds, as long as there is convection, an ascending parcel of air will eventually saturate and form a cummulus cloud. But when will the ascension stop? is it there some way of estimating the maximum height of the cloud or is just the tropopause which stops it?

Thank you very much for any anwser.

[question about supercell generation in Holton's book]

Hello everyone. I have recently started studying the book An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology by James R. Holton to improve my understanding of supercell convective storms. 

However, there are some parts of it that quite confuse me and I was wondering if someone could help me to understand this.

In the page 300, Holton linealizes a flow consisting of a single convective updraft in a basic state westerly flow which depends on z alone by making the vorticity w= j*du/dz+w'(x,y,z,t) and the speed of wind U= i*u+U'(x,y,z,t), being u the mean westerly flow. My question is: what do the terms w' and U' represent? I think that they are a first order terms on a Taylor expansion, but then, Holton writes the curl U x w =i*w'du/dz +j*uç', being ç the vorticity in the z axis, this debunks what I have written, since it seems that the module of the derivate of the vorticity (w') and the derivate of the vorticity on the z direction (ç) coexist. 

So, can someone please tell me what these terms, w' and U' represent?

Also, on the resulting equation, dç'/dt = -u*dç'/dx + dw'/dy * Du/Dz, beinf d/di a partial derivative and D/Di a total one, I don't understand the difference between w' and ç'.

 

Thanks in advance for your answers.

[question about supercell generation]

Hello everyone. I have recently started studying the book An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology by James R. Holton to improve my understanding of supercell convective storms. 

However, there are some parts of it that quite confuse me and I was wondering if someone could help me to understand this.

In the page 300, Holton linealizes a flow consisting of a single convective updraft in a basic state westerly flow which depends on z alone by making the vorticity w= j*du/dz+w'(x,y,z,t) and the speed of wind U= i*u+U'(x,y,z,t), being u the mean westerly flow. My question is: what do the terms w' and U' represent? I think that they are a first order terms on a Taylor expansion, but then, Holton writes the curl U x w =i*w'du/dz +j*uç', being ç the vorticity in the z axis, this debunks what I have written, since it seems that the module of the derivate of the vorticity (w') and the derivate of the vorticity on the z direction (ç) coexist. 

So, can someone please tell me what these terms, w' and U' represent?

 

Thanks in advance for your answers.